I've been writing my Hebrew blog that deals almost exclusively with issues of ICT in education for almost ten years. As of this writing I'm approaching 1000 posts, and too many of those are very wordy. Admittedly I repeat myself there as well, though I honestly think that I make a real contribution to the ongoing discussion (at least in Hebrew) around whether ICT really does, or even should, have any significant influence on education. But beyond the fact that both of these allow me to write too much, they represent two very different writing formats. Each of my blog posts attempts to focus on a specific issue, an issue that more often than not starts as a reaction on my part to something I've read in one of the many education related blogs and sites I follow. The topics the Boidem dealt with, on the other hand, sprang out of my own experience, and rather than focusing, I purposefully allowed myself to digress. I gave precedence to somewhat strange or unexpected developments. Quite frankly, I tried not to be on the cutting edge of the "new", and instead tried to examine whether what we often perceived as "new" really was. Blog posts tried to make a point. More often than not the "point" of a Boidem column was that there wasn't one.

Both of these writings, however, shared a common quality - they used the activity of writing itself to think things through. After undergoing extensive editing, numerous blog posts were ultimately posted with the original final sentence being used as my opening thought. In other words, when I started I thought I knew the point I wanted to make, but as I wrote I discovered unexpected aspects of the issue being examined. This happened in the Boidem as well, though more often than not a Boidem column was not only willing to allow conflicting thoughts to co-exist on the screen - it even encouraged them to do so.